Software updates are an essential part of delivering continuing security and other critical fixes to various software applications. The past few years have seen an increase in the number of update and other critical software distribution mechanisms provided by different software providers. An update mechanism of a software application may be configured to check for updates, download newly available updates in a client machine, notify users of the client machine about the newly available updates, and/or install the newly available updates.
This is a continuation in part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/719,324, entitled “Merchant-Specific Shadow Account Numbers”, which was filed on Mar. 3, 2010
Typically, each individual software application (or a group of software applications) implements its own update mechanism. Various update mechanisms of the client machine may run independently on the client machine, may have independent user interfaces, and may not have any coordinated settings or schedules for checking, downloading and/or installing updates. Users of the client machine may need to keep track of the various update mechanisms, and manage each one of the various update mechanisms independently.